Search and filters.

The search box on the home page reads a single string but understands two different things inside it: artist-name text and year expressions. It splits a query into those two parts before doing anything else, so hendrix 1968 filters to rigs from 1968 and then ranks by how well the remaining text matches an artist name.

The parser recognizes several year and range formats inside the same query:

• 1966-1969 or 1966 to 1969: an explicit range (en dash and em dash both work).
• 1975: an exact year.
• 90s or 1990s: a full decade.
• '72: a two-digit year (resolved to 1900s or 2000s depending on the value).
• before 1980, after 1980, since 1980, until 1980, from 1980: open-ended ranges.
• <1980, <=1980, >1980, >=1980: the same open-ended ranges, comparison-operator style.

Multiple year expressions in one query are combined. An artist must satisfy every range mentioned, not just one of them. Years are matched against an artist's full documented range (their earliest to latest rig), so a query for a single year will surface an artist whose overall range spans that year even if no individual rig lands exactly on it; the rig grid itself still only shows rigs from years that satisfy the query.

Whatever text is left after year expressions are stripped out is matched against artist names and a small alias table (for cases like abbreviations or alternate spellings). Matching is diacritic-insensitive and punctuation-insensitive, and it tolerates minor typos through a bounded edit-distance check: short queries need an exact or near-exact token match, longer queries get a little more slack.

Results are ranked, not just filtered: an exact name match scores highest, a name that starts with the query scores next, a match on a whole word scores above a match buried mid-string, and so on down to fuzzy token matches. A query that is only a year expression, with no text, switches the result list to chronological order instead of relevance order.

Independent of the search box, the filter rail exposes decade toggles (multi-select) and a sort order: name, earliest year first, or latest year first. Decade filters and search text combine: turning on a decade toggle narrows the pool of artists before the search query is scored against it.

All of this round-trips through the URL as query parameters: ?q= for the search text, ?decades= for a comma-separated list of decade years, and ?sort= for the sort order, so a filtered view is a link you can share or bookmark.

Press / or ⌘K / Ctrl K from anywhere on the page to jump focus to the search box, and Esc while focused to clear it. When a query returns no results, the site shows suggested near-matches drawn from the same ranking logic that powers normal search, rather than a dead end.